https://www.stihl.com/120th-birthday-andreas-stihl.aspx
Stihl
Waiblingen, 09.11.2016
120th Birthday of STIHL Company Founder Andreas Stihl
He is considered to be the "Father of the Chainsaw", revolutionized work in the woods and established a company that is now one of the world's leading manufacturers of chainsaws and other outdoor power tools.
Andreas Stihl was born in Zurich on November 10, 1896
A Ukrainian serviceman stands amid destroyed Russian tanks in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, on April 6 Credit - Felipe Dana—AP
From 11/10/1896 ( Andreas Stihl ) To 2/15/1955 ( ) is 21280 days
21280 = 10640 + 10640
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/20/1994 ( from the thoughts in my conscious mind, coinciding with United States of America Veterans Affairs hospital psychiatric doctor medical drugs: in non-aviator related duties boots on the ground in Bosnia as Kerry Wayne Burgess the United States Marine Corps captain this day is my United States Navy Cross medal date of record ) is 10640 days
From 2/15/1955 ( ) To 5/14/1990 ( departing as enlisted United States Navy Fire Controlman Second Class Petty Officer (FC2)(E-5) Kerry Wayne Burgess, my honorable discharge from United States Navy active service ) is 12872 days
12872 = 6436 + 6436
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 6/17/1983 ( premiere US film "Superman III" ) is 6436 days
From 2/15/1955 ( ) To 11/1/1978 ( premiere US film "Watership Down" ) is 8660 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 7/19/1989 ( the United Airlines Flight 232 crash in Sioux City Iowa and from the thoughts in my conscious mind, coinciding with United States of America Veterans Affairs hospital psychiatric doctor medical drugs: the end of Kerry Burgess - *me* - the natural human being cloned from another human being {Thomas Reagan} ) is 8660 days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Stavridis
James G. Stavridis
From Wikipedia
James George Stavridis (born February 15, 1955) is a retired United States Navy admiral
commander, United States European Command and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe (2009 to 2013), the first Navy officer to have held these positions.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086393/quotes
IMDb
Superman III (1983)
Quotes
Evil Superman: You always wanted to fly Kent. Now's your chance!
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/speeches/clark-usna2002.txt
Admiral Vern Clark Remarks
United States Naval Academy Commencement
Annapolis, Maryland
24 May 2002
ADMIRAL CLARK:
First of all, my congratulations to you Marines who just received your commission. Well done.
To you future Ensigns in the Class of 2002, make the Marines your friends. They are our number one joint partners. If there's anything that I say to you today that is a directive, I direct you to never forget that.
From 4/3/1917 ( Arthur Graeme West killed during World War I ) To 5/14/1990 ( departing as enlisted United States Navy Fire Controlman Second Class Petty Officer (FC2)(E-5) Kerry Wayne Burgess, my honorable discharge from United States Navy active service ) is 26704 days
26704 = 13352 + 13352
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 5/24/2002 ( ) is 13352 days
From 12/24/1951 ( premiere US TV series "Hallmark Hall of Fame" ) To 5/24/2002 ( ) is 18414 days
18414 = 9207 + 9207
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 1/17/1991 ( from the thoughts in my conscious mind, coinciding with United States of America Veterans Affairs hospital psychiatric doctor medical drugs: the date of record of my United States Navy Medal of Honor as Kerry Wayne Burgess chief warrant officer United States Marine Corps circa 1991 officially the United States Apache attack helicopter pilot ) is 9207 days
From 12/20/1994 ( from the thoughts in my conscious mind, coinciding with United States of America Veterans Affairs hospital psychiatric doctor medical drugs: in non-aviator related duties boots on the ground in Bosnia as Kerry Wayne Burgess the United States Marine Corps captain this day is my United States Navy Cross medal date of record ) To 5/24/2002 ( ) is 2712 days
2712 = 1356 + 1356
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 7/20/1969 ( my biological brother Thomas Reagan the United States Navy Commander circa 1969 was United States Apollo 11 Eagle spacecraft United States Navy astronaut landing and walking on the planet Earth's moon ) is 1356 days
From 6/29/1995 ( the Mir space station docking of the United States space shuttle Atlantis orbiter vehicle mission STS-71 includes me Kerry Wayne Burgess the United States Marine Corps officer and United States STS-71 pilot astronaut and my 3rd official United States of America National Aeronautics Space Administration orbital flight of 4 overall ) To 5/24/2002 ( ) is 2521 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 9/27/1972 ( premiere US film "A Separate Peace" ) is 2521 days
https://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/clark/speeches/clark-usna2002.txt
Admiral Vern Clark Remarks
United States Naval Academy Commencement
Annapolis, Maryland
24 May 2002
ADMIRAL CLARK: Congratulations, Ensigns.
I have one last thing to say. Go write some history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Graeme_West
Arthur Graeme West
From Wikipedia
Arthur Graeme West (1891 – 3 April 1917) was a British writer and war poet. West was born in Eaton, Norfolk, educated at Highgate School, then Blundell's School and Balliol College, Oxford, and killed by a sniper in 1917.
Military service
West enlisted as a Private with the Public Schools Battalion in January 1915.
Writing
West is principally known for one book, The Diary of a Dead Officer (1919), which presents a scathing picture of army life and is said to be one of the most vivid accounts of daily life in the trenches.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57293/god-how-i-hate-you-you-young-cheerful-men
Poetry Foundation
“God! How I hate you, you young cheerful men”
BY ARTHUR GRAEME WEST
God! How I hate you, you young cheerful men,
Whose pious poetry blossoms on your graves
As soon as you are in them, nurtured up
By the salt of your corruption, and the tears
Of mothers, local vicars, college deans,
And flanked by prefaces and photographs
From all you minor poet friends—the fools—
Who paint their sentimental elegies
Where sure, no angel treads; and, living, share
The dead’s brief immortality
Oh Christ!
To think that one could spread the ductile wax
Of his fluid youth to Oxford’s glowing fires
And take her seal so ill! Hark how one chants—
“Oh happy to have lived these epic days”—
“These epic days”! And he’d been to France,
And seen the trenches, glimpsed the huddled dead
In the periscope, hung in the rusting wire:
Chobed by their sickley fœtor, day and night
Blown down his throat: stumbled through ruined hearths,
Proved all that muddy brown monotony,
Where blood’s the only coloured thing. Perhaps
Had seen a man killed, a sentry shot at night,
Hunched as he fell, his feet on the firing-step,
His neck against the back slope of the trench,
And the rest doubled up between, his head
Smashed like and egg-shell, and the warm grey brain
Spattered all bloody on the parados:
Had flashed a torch on his face, and known his friend,
Shot, breathing hardly, in ten minutes—gone!
Yet still God’s in His heaven, all is right
In the best possible of worlds. The woe,
Even His scaled eyes must see, is partial, only
A seeming woe, we cannot understand.
God loves us, God looks down on this out strife
And smiles in pity, blows a pipe at times
And calls some warriors home. We do not die,
God would not let us, He is too “intense,”
Too “passionate,” a whole day sorrows He
Because a grass-blade dies. How rare life is!
On earth, the love and fellowship of men,
Men sternly banded: banded for what end?
Banded to maim and kill their fellow men—
For even Huns are men. In heaven above
A genial umpire, a good judge of sport,
Won’t let us hurt each other! Let’s rejoice
God keeps us faithful, pens us still in fold.
Ah, what a faith is ours (almost, it seems,
Large as a mustard-seed)—we trust and trust,
Nothing can shake us! Ah, how good God is
To suffer us to be born just now, when youth
That else would rust, can slake his blade in gore,
Where very God Himself does seem to walk
The bloody fields of Flanders He so loves!
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57292/the-night-patrol
Poetry Foundation
The Night Patrol
BY ARTHUR GRAEME WEST
France, March 1916.
Over the top! The wire’s thin here, unbarbed
Plain rusty coils, not staked, and low enough:
Full of old tins, though—“When you’re through, all three,
Aim quarter left for fifty yards or so,
Then straight for that new piece of German wire;
See if it’s thick, and listen for a while
For sounds of working; don’t run any risks;
About an hour; now, over!”
And we placed
Our hands on the topmost sand-bags, leapt, and stood
A second with curved backs, then crept to the wire,
Wormed ourselves tinkling through, glanced back, and dropped.
The sodden ground was splashed with shallow pools,
And tufts of crackling cornstalks, two years old,
No man had reaped, and patches of spring grass.
Half-seen, as rose and sank the flares, were strewn
The wrecks of our attack: the bandoliers,
Packs, rifles, bayonets, belts, and haversacks,
Shell fragments, and the huge whole forms of shells
Shot fruitlessly—and everywhere the dead.
Only the dead were always present—present
As a vile sickly smell of rottenness;
The rustling stubble and the early grass,
The slimy pools — the dead men stank through all,
Pungent and sharp; as bodies loomed before,
And as we passed, they stank: then dulled away
To that vague fœtor, all encompassing,
Infecting earth and air. They lay, all clothed,
Each in some new and piteous attitude
That we well marked to guide us back: as he,
Outside our wire, that lay on his back and crossed
His legs Crusader-wise: I smiled at that,
And thought on Elia and his Temple Church.
From him, at quarter left, lay a small corpse,
Down in a hollow, huddled as in a bed,
That one of us put his hand on unawares.
Next was a bunch of half a dozen men
All blown to bits, an archipelago
Of corrupt fragments, vexing to us three,
Who had no light to see by, save the flares.
On such a trail, so light, for ninety yards
We crawled on belly and elbows, till we saw,
Instead of lumpish dead before our eyes,
The stakes and crosslines of the German wire.
We lay in shelter of the last dead man,
Ourselves as dead, and heard their shovels ring
Turning the earth, then talk and cough at times.
A sentry fired and a machine-gun spat;
They shot a glare above us, when it fell
And spluttered out in the pools of No Man’s Land,
We turned and crawled past the remembered dead:
Past him and him, and them and him, until,
For he lay some way apart, we caught the scent
Of the Crusader and slide past his legs,
And through the wire and home, and got our rum.
Source: The Diary of a Dead Officer (1918)
https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-military-needs-learn-ukraine-100039536.html
Yahoo! News
What the U.S. Military Needs to Learn from the Ukraine War
James Stavridis
Mon, April 11, 2022, 3:00 AM
A Ukrainian serviceman stands amid destroyed Russian tanks in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, on April 6 Credit - Felipe Dana—AP
As the brutal fighting continues in the Ukraine War, it seems likely to fundamentally upend the way we wage war in the 21st-century. From new tactics to equipment, the Russian invasion of Ukraine may presage fundamental changes in how war is conducted. What can Western militaries learn from the war thus far?
First, the extraordinary success the Ukrainian forces (armed with western technology) are enjoying against Russia armor. The numbers of tanks, armored vehicles, and heavy trucks destroyed by the Ukrainians are almost certainly in the thousands. This is largely the result of the hand-held anti-armor weapons provided by NATO countries (NLAWS from Britain, Javelins from the U.S., etc).
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But it is also indicative of a tactical approach by the Ukrainians that fuses the intelligence provided by the West; the portability of the missile and drone systems; the employment of them by small, light special forces teams; and entirely new systems like the Switchblade drones.
Most importantly, each tank and armored vehicle destroyed means more dead Russians. Russian soldiers killed in action probably number around 15,000 over five weeks, which is staggering. As a point of comparison, the U.S. lost 7,000 in twenty years of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the lost armor stocks will be difficult to replace in the short term. Each Russian tank costs more than $10 million, but each missile is only a hundred thousand dollars or so. War is hell, as General Sherman said in the American Civil War, but it is also expensive.
Is it time to write the obituary for the tank on the battlefield? Will they turn out to be the battleships of the 21st century, rendered obsolete by new technologies and tactics? It is certainly time to consider reducing tank inventories (as the U.S. Marine Corps is already doing) and using the resources to move toward new systems, notably unmanned. Tanks can still be effectively employed, but must be used in a coherent combined-arms manner that includes protection of them from such “cheap kill” mechanisms.
Second, the concept of close air support is increasingly at risk as well. Alongside the concerns about the efficacy of heavy armor are about the vulnerability of helicopters. We are seeing $18 million Russian attack helicopters destroyed by a hundred thousand dollar stingers—over and over. This was a key tactic in allowing the Afghanistan mujahideen to defeat the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Again, the economics of this, especially for a weak economy like Russia, are daunting, as well as replacing trained pilots.
And that is before new swarm drone systems come into full force. As artificial intelligence becomes a wartime reality, the ability to control large numbers of unmanned systems and operate them in synch to attack large relatively less maneuverable platforms like helicopters and troop transports. We are at the leading edge of achieving this capability, and doing so augers badly for expensive manned aircraft, especially those that operate routinely near to the ground.
The lesson here is not (yet) to fully walk away from manned aircraft providing the close support on the battlefield. But the Ukrainian war is a warning that we should be spending more on research and development that improves unmanned air systems, both in ground attack and in anti-air capacities; leverage improvements in artificial intelligence to make them operate synergistically together; and experiment with such capabilities aggressively to be able to provide close air support from higher altitudes and with unmanned, less expensive vehicles controlled directly by ground forces.
Read More: Ukraine Is Our Past and Our Future
Third, another key factor on the Ukrainian battlefield has been the ability of Western intelligence systems to track Russian formations and provide real-time targeting directly to the Ukrainians. This has led not only to high levels of Russians killed in action, but also to operations killing Russian general officers. This in turn creates chaotic conditions, with numerous reports indicating a lack of coherent command and control on the battlefield, and operations being directed from Moscow.
When I was Supreme Allied Commander at NATO, in strategic command of the Afghan operation, I could not have imagined taking tactical control of 150,000 troops in the field. Yet that is exactly what appears to be happing in Ukraine, with attendant failures. The lesson is that by providing real-time, highly precise targeting to forces in the field, a belligerent can help undermine one of the true centers-of-gravity in combat: a coherent command and control system anchored by capable senior leaders.
Finally, we should learn from the continuing Russian playbook of what are clearly war crimes. We need to appreciate that our opponents are going to utilize horrible tactics that are in fact war crimes: destruction of civilian infrastructure (including internet and cyber systems) with indiscriminate fires; false flag operations replete with deep fake videos; weaponizing civilian populations by creating the conditions for mass movements, taxing the logistics of the nation under attack; utilization of unprincipled mercenaries like the Wagner Group, Chechens, and Syrians; and at least threatening the use of chemical and nuclear weapons.
All of this has been called “hybrid” or “gray zone” warfare, and we’ve seen the Russians go to this list of dirty tricks in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Syria over the past several decades. We need to do a better job of preparing to face these new realities on the battlefield. Obviously, we will not use these techniques, but we need to reverse engineer and blunt them in our training and equipment choices. This means training our troops to operate in chemical and biological environments more effectively; providing more civil support to local populations to defuse the impact of refugees; sharpen our ability to collect evidence to undermine fake videos and propaganda; and hone our responses to battlefield cyber attacks to include offensive options.
A new tactical triad is emerging in the 21st century battlefield—special forces, unmanned systems, and cyber will be far more important going forward. While legacy systems from tanks to destroyers to close air support aircraft will retain utility, we need to rethink our way of war. Sadly, there is much to learn from the battlefields of Ukraine.
- posted by me, Kerry Burgess 05:04 AM Pacific-time USA Tuesday 04/12/2022
